Many of the inmates who end up confined in the most severe conditions of confinement are precisely the group least capable of tolerating such conditions.… When placed in stringent conditions of confinement, they become agitated and paranoid, their emotional state and behavior deteriorates, and finally they "max out" — many become floridly psychotic, or so agitated that they engage in awful, grotesque behaviors: they cover themselves and their cells with feces, they mutilate themselves, they try to kill themselves.

Unfortunately, the prison system has traditionally had little capacity to understand or cope with this problem. Instead, once such an individual gets into this downward spiral of disturbed behavior and punishment, he cannot get out.… Some inmates go through a grotesque "revolving door" pattern, remaining confined in a stringent, punitive condition until they finally become so ill as to require psychiatric hospitalization, a setting where they eventually recover just enough, to then be returned to the very same toxic environment which had caused this psychiatric decompensation.

Moreover, there is something intrinsically illogical for any correctional system to become so preoccupied with control and punishment as to lose sight of the fact that virtually all of the inmates in its custody will someday be released back into our communities.… Such correctional policies inevitably decrease the chance that the released inmate will manage to reestablish himself in the larger community, and thus such policies create a great danger for us — for those who live in the communities which the inmate will someday reenter. I have seen many inmates who were released directly to the street from solitary confinement settings, totally unequipped to deal with people or with the tasks of free life.

Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission